Let me stop and present a quick story here. In the summer of 2013, I worked for the U.S. Oncology Network, which is a part of McKesson. McKesson is a Fortune 15 health care company. I was working predominantly within HR, although the job I had was more content-focused (kind of like HR Communications would be the best way to explain it). That summer, they were working on an employee engagement study. The thing was out-sourced and had about 100 or so questions. After I left my summer gig, they got the results back — I offered to help analyze the data, and was taken up on it initially, then it fell through the cracks — and while the results were interesting, it was still results based on people clicking through 100 questions. That’s not really organic. The summer I worked there, I had sat in tons of 1-on-1 BS’ing sessions with employees where they had great ideas about a process, a re-organization of a small division, things to do with staff, how to bring people into the organization better, and a whole host of other things.

I often feel like organizations don’t pursue this kind of organic outreach because it’s not formalized enough — since it’s not formalized, there’s a legal fear that “Oh, if we got information this way, maybe someone will be able to call us on this.” A lot of structure within organizations does feel like it comes from a fear of getting in trouble, and that’s where the idea of “organic” communication and feedback can sometimes suffer.

The other area it can suffer is pretty simple: employee ideas and employee engagement are not, per se, revenue-facing things. They could be — Google makes a ton of money because of ideas like AdWords, which employees created and brought up the ladder — but that’s not the conventional way of thinking about it.

Most organizations preach organizational health and full-on engagement, but the only people with access to information and resources tend to be the senior-level people. That’s all well and good and it makes sense — you work hard, you become senior, you get more access, THAT’S THE AMERICAN WAY, RIGHT? — but it limits the potential of the org.

Consider these two simple sentences from the Fast Company article:

From intern to senior executive, you’ll be amazed by the insight that exists inside your organization. The next breakthrough may come from where you least expect it.

Think about that sentence: “the next breakthrough may come from where you least expect it.”

Now think about this: in your org, how many senior leaders do you think actually believe that?

If you think they do, awesome. If you think they say they do and instead assume all the good ideas and knowledge needs to be clustered near their level, that’s a gigantic fool’s errand.

So while you may be scared about not having a formalized process in place, go and talk to different employees. Learn what bothers them, what they like, what ideas they have to improve the organization and what it affects. Phrased another way in this Fast Company article:

Employees want to do a good job. We want to help and feel valued. Harness this energy and you’ve got our engagement.

In sum, employee engagement does matter — but it doesn’t matter in the way we often think, which is “something to be tracked and coordinated and reported back on.”

Nope.

It matters in terms of building actual relationships with the people that spend half their waking day supporting your organization, and learning from them.